Sometimes you get careless when filling out forms online. Okay, one time I got careless filling out an online form. It, unfortunately, it happened to be for a plane ticket.

Work Trip

I had a work trip coming up when I needed to fly to Chicago. The company I work for doesn’t partner with a travel agency so we do our own bookings, which I’m completely fine with. Since I work for Rakuten, they encourage us to use sites that get cashback in order to book business travel. This works for me, as we get to keep the cashback and works for the company as it gives our partners more business.

For this flight, I had booked using JustFly.com. I had booked with them previously without any issue for our trip to Toronto. They were offering an elevated cashback rate at the time and the price was identical to the itinerary I wanted on JetBlue.

Checking the Itinerary

Right after receiving the booking confirmation I used the JetBlue confirmation number to verify the flight details were found on JetBlue.com and the flights were correct. You have 24 hours to make changes if you find anything amiss. My itinerary was set.. or so I thought.

A few days before my flight I checked the itinerary again on JetBlue and noticed that the first name on my itinerary was wrong. It was my youngest son’s first name followed by my middle and last name. I checked the JustFly.com receipt in my email and to my horror found that indeed the name was incorrect there as well.

I must have filled the form our wrong, or my browser auto-filled the names incorrect and I didn’t notice. This was definitely my fault and I needed to figure out how to update it so I could fly the following Monday. The first thing I did on JetBlue was to add my frequent flyer number to the itinerary figuring that would at least link the ticket to my account.

By entering my number, it magically changed the name on the reservation to my correct name as far as I could see in the JetBlue app. I double-checked on the website and it was updated there as well. That seemed a little odd, but from everything, I could see it looked correct. Problem solved!

WRONG!

24 hours before my flight I went to check-in for my flight in the app and get an error. Oh oh… I immediately called JetBlue customer support and after waiting on hold for “less than 17 minutes” I got the news that my itinerary still had the wrong first name on the ticket in the backend systems. That was a problem.

The helpful agent said that since I booked through a 3rd party they would have to make the change or else I’d have to pay a $50 fee to JetBlue to take over the reservation and make that change themselves. They said the 3rd party would be able to make that change for free and suggested I call them to avoid the fee.

JustFly.com Take One

That sounded easy, so I called JustFly.com hoping this would be straight forward and got through to an agent within a couple of minutes. They verified my information and I explained my issue. The agent was very helpful and said I should be able to make the change but they would need a scan of my passport in order to verify my identity before they could make that change. Fair enough. The agent gave me instructions on where to send the email and mentioned I’d have to call back in about an hour for them to prep things on their end.

JustFly.com Take-Two

Things were all good so far so I scanned my passport and sent the email as instructed. After a couple of hours, I called back JustFly.com again and quickly got through to an agent. I told them my story again and they saw my passport scan in their system and were ready to start making the change but it would be a $75 charge. Ugh. They forgot to mention that in the first call. I mentioned that JetBlue would do it for $50 and said JustFly.com would be able to do it for free. The agent said there wasn’t a way around the change fee as it was standard, but she’d get everything ready in the system so that it would be ready if things didn’t work out with JetBlue.

JetBlue Take Two

I called back JetBlue and after another hold time of “less than 17 minutes” again I spoke to an agent. I told the whole story again (I was getting good at it by this point) and the agent said it was possible. There would be a $50 fee as well as the cancellation fee and the difference in fare because they would have to cancel and re-ticket my itinerary. The sinking feeling was setting in and the $75 fee from JustFly.com was looking better. I felt like every layer I peeled back the fees got higher.

JustFly.com Take Three

Calling back JustFly.com I again got through to an agent within minutes. I never had to wait more than a couple of minutes to talk to an agent during any of my calls. My hope was that I could pay their $75 change fee and finally be done with this as it had taken up far too much of my day by this point. Unfortunately, I was just getting started.

This agent insisted that my ticket could not be changed at all more than 24 hours after I booked it (I had booked it several weeks prior by that point). I asked her to look in my file to see the notes from the other calls but she insisted I was out of luck. I couldn’t make any changes to my ticket and basically had a completely useless ticket since the name didn’t match.

I was pretty frustrated and politely ended the call as it was clear I wasn’t going to make any progress with this agent.

JustFly.com Take Four

After a few minutes trying to figure out what I was going to do next I tried calling JustFly.com back to see if I had ANY other options. It again only took a minute or two to get through to an agent and this agent was quite sympathetic but needed to talk to her supervisor to see what my options were. This meant putting me on hold.

I was on hold for at least 45 minutes, though she helpfully checked in every 5 minutes or so and I appreciated that she was trying hard to find a solution. During this time I was trying to figure out on my side what out fo the box options I could come up with.

Looking at the change fees from JetBlue my ticket that cost $160, it would cost $150 in change fees to either cancel it or change it. Best case I’d have $10 in credit to apply towards a new ticket which was looking to cost about $325 if I had to buy one for the next day.

I then started to look at ways to find a flight on points. Since this was entirely my fault for entering the information correctly I was on the hook for any extra costs from my company’s perspective. I could use JetBlue points as there was availability, but it would have used a lot of points. There was some availability on some United itineraries. The cash price was about $350 for the next day fare, but there was saver availability on points. It was still going to cost about 25,000 points. While a reasonable value, it wasn’t great.

I remembered reading about the Avianca LifeMiles program from several blog posts recently. Avianca is a Colombian airline that is part of the Star Alliance which United is also a part of. That means you can use Avianca points to book flights on United, such as the BOS<->ORD flight I was looking at.

Intrigued, and having nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I searched the Avianca site for flights and the same itinerary I saw for 25,000 United points cost 20,000 Avianca points. I don’t actually have any Avianca points, but My Citi Prestige card, which earns Citi ThankYou points are transferable instantly to Avianca. As luck would have it there was also a 25% transfer bonus going on at the time so I could transfer 16,000 ThankYou points to get 20,000 Avianca LifeMiles points. That was a pretty solid return on those points and the itinerary was very similar to what I had with JetBlue, so I had a backup plan.

Still, on hold with JustFly.com the agent finally got back to me. She and her supervisor tried but were unable to do anything for me. They said the ticket was completely non-refundable and unable to be changed and they couldn’t do anything for me. They said it was possible JetBlue might be able to make an exception for me. This wasn’t the news I was hoping for but was what I was expecting.

JetBlue Take Three

I called back JetBlue and got to an agent after a hold time of “less than 13 minutes” this time. Small improvements! I explained my situation again and wanted to see what options they could provide. I mentioned I’d been back and forth with JustFly.com a few times and they kept pointing me back to JetBlue. This agent said they would need to get a supervisor to change the name but contrary to the previous agent it wouldn’t be an issue and they wouldn’t need to re-ticket the itinerary.

The only cost would be the $50 fee to take over the reservation. I agreed to the fee if they were able to actually make that change for me because at this point $50 was better than the alternatives. They put me on hold and confirmed with their supervisor. They then took my credit card info while the supervisor did their thing. After a couple of minutes, that agent came back again and said everything was taken care of and the supervisor had waived the $50 fee since they had seen the notes on my history of multiple attempts to get this changed.

SUCCESS! In the end, I didn’t have to pay ANY fees. All it took was about 4 hours on the phone over the course of my Sunday, all because I stupidly entered the wrong information on my ticket and didn’t check it properly.

What I Learned

This was a painful learning experience. In the end, it didn’t cost me anything other than my time. It definitely cost me a lot of time, though. Outside the obvious “confirm the details of the ticket when you book” lesson, I also learned that I need to be persistent when talking to the agents. Not all agents interpret the issues and the rules the same way. Most want to be helpful, but they have rules they need to follow. Some of those rules are open for interpretation which is why you can get wildly different answers to the same problem. The old “hang up and call again” advice definitely worked for me in this instance.

I’m always as calm and polite as I can be when talking with customer service people. They have a thankless job and people generally want to be helpful. I find they generally respond to pleas for help than they do to outright demands

For this issue, I knew and admitted it was completely my fault in the beginning. I was hoping for help, not expecting it and was lucky enough to find an agent in the end that was able to help in the way I needed.

On the points and miles front, I learned a little about last minute booking. I usually book trips many months ahead of time so I’m not used to doing things less than 24 hours from takeoff. It was nice to see that there actually is available for these types of flights and you can get good value if the need arises.

I also learned a bit about the Avianca LifeMiles program. I often ignore it because usually when I’ve been looking to book United flights recently, it’s been to Hawaii in the summer and availability has been pretty limited on United. Availability on partner airlines is sometimes the same and often much worse. Now that I know more about this program, though, I’ll be checking it more often for domestic flights. It’s not uncommon for there to be a transfer bonus with this program and that can really amp up the value of the points redemption.

I’m glad I stuck with things and ended up getting the name changed without any extra cost. The flight itself went flawlessly. While I was frustrated that JustFly.com couldn’t really help me, I don’t blame them at all as it was my fault and I was trying to get things changed less than 24 hours before the flight when their hands are more tied than further out from the flight. Their customer support hold times were generally really good to talk to a first-level agent and they generally wanted to help but were restricted by what their systems would allow them to do.

I thought JetBlue also did a good job. While the hold times were longer than ideal and the quality of the hold music was horrendous (why all the static!?!), in the end, I got what I wanted to be done and they waived my fee to “make things right” since I had been having such a frustrating time with things. They didn’t have to do that so I appreciate that they did, even though it was ultimately just a few keystrokes on their end.